Libra

Although Philippe Besombes was a member of two influential French groups in the late 1970s, P\xF4le and\n\ Hydravion ...

Although Philippe Besombes was a member of two influential French groups in the late 1970s, Pôle and Hydravion, any esteem he now enjoys is overwhelmingly due to his prominent inclusion on Nurse with Wound's notorious "influences list," which famously graced the liner notes of their 1979 debut. Unsurprisingly, NWW's Stephen Stapleton (master of the griseous, warlock-from-the-North image) simply had to reward Besombes for a biography any promising young eccentric would covet.

A toiling candidate for a doctorate in chemistry at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Besombes got through his student years with a steady intake of French pop, free jazz, free love, and free hallucinogenic substances. Eventually growing bored with traditional instrumentation, Besombes turned to the lavish lifestyle and opulent environs of a true early electronic pioneer: breaking into neighboring physics labs and "borrowing" their equipment. During any interims, he intrepidly traveled to the mideast, brushed up on his tabla and sitar skills, studied briefly under Stockhausen and Xenakis, and finally released the Libra soundtrack, his finest work, at the ripe age of 24.

Besombes' music may have anticipated everything from The Bomb Squad's mélange of shattered shrills to Luke Vibert's anarchic slapstick-hop, but no one should be more grateful that Besombes turned from chemistry to electronics than his old lab partner. If Libra is any indication, Besombes was the Jerry Lewis-in-cardiac-arrest of the lab, leaving lighted Bunsen burners in his pocket and sporadically diving into shelves of glassware. The deceivingly titled "Jaune" is a rabid merry-go-round horse in Toontown, unleashing volatile potions of carbonated poisons and barbarized tape-loops before sizzling down in the sound of exploding construction sites and psychedelic exhilaration. On "PJF 261", cut-up dialogues are doled out over gurgling, choking sound effects and cathedral diva sirens, like some epochal brawl between the blasphemous and beatific.

Although this iconoclastic, convoluted genre is the most efficient at merging the popular and avant-garde music of Besombes's training, Libra (perhaps because it's a soundtrack) ventures through almost every experimental genre of the early 1970s, from spliced tape works and minimalism to loose folk-rock and dub. This bizarre, endlessly fascinating juxtaposition is all the more mysterious since the film itself has seemingly fallen off the edge of the earth. Nevertheless, if the poster is to be believed, the movie apparently concerned the madcap meandering of a translucent cowboy who happens to be as big as the moon.

Whether or not the poster's synopsis is accurate, this is undeniably the music a moon-sized cowboy would listen to: "Raggacountry", for example, is Delta sitar being windswept over echoing percussion. "Boogimmick" is a self-parodic blues-rock solo haunted by probing satellites and pulsating, parched craters. "Rugby" takes a similar guitar riff and throbs it over free jazz drumrolls and orgiastic, weeping babies. Imagine cramming a hack Ronnie Van Zant clone and a pedophilic clown into a mother's womb, and you're halfway there.

The more ambient pieces are just as worthwhile, despite that their random dispersal throughout the album makes for a dizzyingly uneven listen. The droning bells and plangent crashes of "Theme Grave" start off as an erudite, flickering tonal exploration and end in a dignified funeral procession. On the comparatively lengthy "Avécandista", a screeching child's voice is taunted on every side by seemingly arbitrary organ conflagrations and Morse code squalor.

Unfortunately, the four songs not written by Besombes are vastly inferior to the other material on the album, bristling with dull Bacharach-folk and lethargic brass choruses, somehow both lazy and fatiguing simultaneously. Not even the sparsely sprinkled prog-distortion is enough to lift them out of their doldrums. To make up for these embarrassments, Israel's MIO Records has filled out the album to 76 minutes with four bonus tracks, one of which is a brooding, 20-minute prepared piano piece. The purpose of any prepared piano is to display the physicality (and percussion) of the instrument, to extract the piano from that ambiguous, incorporeal domain of sound we traditionally associate with music and kick it around a bit. Besombes' version succeeds remarkably, letting razors shred the strings and frame, toppling marbles down the soundboard, and variously knocking, battering and scraping the piano's sides and interior. At one point, even the rusty hinge of a piano bench is lent to the instrument's tottering rhythm.

The remaining bonus tracks are instructive, if only because they point towards the synthesis of the popular and experimental that Besombes' music personifies. Despite Besombes' current obscurity, if you need only one song to represent the stunning collision of genres that resulted in what you and I call modern music, you could do far worse than "La Ville", Libra's masterpiece and a tune that even today smacks of audacity and ingenuity with its manic jazz drumming, spy-soundtrack bass, Latin percussion and backwards tapes of conniving seagulls and destruction derbies. "La Ville" feels like one of those moments that irreversibly set the pop music of the last quarter-century on a course for trip-hop and noise-rock, veneration and confrontation, culture-clashes and mind-melts. And, as if that wasn't enough, it's in fucking French.